What’s at stake when governments set the standards for religious practice? Policymakers in North America and Europe regularly advocate abroad for religious freedom, interfaith dialogue, religious tolerance, and protections for religious minorities. But what is the real outcome of such intervention? In her new book, Beyond Religious Freedom, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd makes the case that such policies actually create more social tensions and divisions than they resolve. Recently she took some time to talk with us about her book, and why international relations got religion wrong.

What prompted you to write this book? Is it part of a wider conversation or series of conversations?

EH: Beyond Religious Freedom is an attempt to think differently about religion in relation to law and governance on a global scale. In the field of religion and international affairs there’s been a gold-rush mentality lately as scholars scurry to ‘get religion right’ – but I find many of these efforts to be confused and even troubling. The problem, as I noted in a recent piece for The Monkey Cage, is that international relations got religion but got it wrong. Beyond Religious Freedom develops an alternative that neither celebrates religion for its allegedly peaceful potential nor condemns it for its allegedly violent tendencies. It proposes a new framework for the study of religion, law, and governance.

The book brings together conversations from a range of sources, including on the politics of international human rights and the European Court’s jurisprudence; the study of contemporary religion; law and the legalization of religious difference; Turkish and Alevi studies; and debates over religion and religious freedom, and the politics of religious outreach and toleration programming in US and European foreign policy. These are topics that haven’t been brought together before in this way, and I think together they contribute in important ways to an effort to better understand the intersection of religion and global politics today.

How would you describe the challenges facing scholars of religion and global politics?

EH: Today there’s a disjuncture between how religion is lived in the world around us and the way many scholars are writing about it. A wave of scholars has been working overtime trying to identify precisely the contribution of religion to world affairs and to control religion for certain political ends. That is a world apart from the way religion is lived by people, the myriad and complex ways in which religion is interwoven and entangled with how they live their lives and get through the day, individually and collectively. There’s a deep disconnect between these two, and the scholars are missing the reality of lived religion as they construct their theories and models.

To sort this out, I distinguish in the book between expert religion, lived religion, and governed religion. This framework provides the backbone of my argument. Expert religion is religion as construed by those who generate what is understood to be policy-relevant knowledge about religion, including scholars and other experts. Lived religion is religion as practiced by ordinary individuals and groups as they interact with a variety of religious authorities, rituals, texts, and institutions and seek to navigate and make sense of their lives, connections with others, and place in the world. Official or governed religion is religion as construed by those in positions of political and religious power. This includes states, often through the law, but also supranational courts, governing entities such as the European Union, a range of international and nongovernmental organizations, and also churches and other religious organizations.

Can religion be treated as it if were a coherent and stable variable?

EH: It can’t. We cannot ignore religion by collapsing it into other domains of social life or reducing it to allegedly more fundamental social, economic, or political variables. Nor can we rely on a singular, trans-historical, and transcultural notion of religion as a freestanding descriptive and analytical category. That is, religion cannot be treated as if it were a differentiable quantity that can influence society and politics without being merged into it and shaped by it. We need other ways between and beyond these two extremes. The challenge, then, is to devise new ways to ‘normalize’ religion, neither absorbing it fully into the political nor allowing it to stand apart from history.

International relations theory and practice has a way to go on this front. I’ve been struck by the strangely persistent, almost ritualistic alternation in this field between the naïve celebration of religion as the source of morality, community, and freedom, and the simultaneous denigration of religion as the root of all global instability. Robert Orsi has described this as the ‘agenda of reassurance’ and the ‘agenda of surveillance.’ These agendas have real world consequences: in the first case, governmental support for and deference to religious “authorities,” self-identified and/or created by religious experts; in the second, the dangerous politics of national and international religious surveillance, discipline, and reform. My book criticizes these practices and trends.

What would you like readers to take away from your book?

EH: You never know what readers will find in a book. I’d like to see a shift in how scholars and pundits talk and write about global situations and problems that are described as essentially ‘religious’ in nature. This doesn’t make sense given that religion does not stand apart from history. Instead of asking, “why are Burmese Buddhists persecuting religious minorities such as the Rohingya?” we should ask, what factors—economic, political, social, religious, geographical, and so on—are enabling the comprehensive exclusion of the Rohingya from Burmese society? What’s the role of the state and other interests, including powerful monks’ organizations such as 969, in these processes? Who benefits from framing this as a matter of religious difference, and as a problem of religious freedom, and what do we lose sight of in that framing? The book urges readers to adopt a critical sensibility when they see terms like religious conflict, religious minority, religious violence, religious freedom, or even religious diversity and religious pluralism. The idea is to take a step back and think about what it means to describe a conflict or a situation as ‘religious,’ and whether it might be advisable to broaden the lens to see a bigger picture in which religion is entangled in a host of economic, social, ethnic, political, and legal formations. Religion is a deeply intersected category.

Were you influenced by the media and scholarly frenzy surrounding religion?

EH: I tried to distance myself from that, and the sense of urgency to locate a solution and prescribe the right policy. I’ve come to believe that what’s needed right now is something rather different. I hope this comes across to readers. What if we lower the volume of these conversations? Is there a register in which one can speak, teach, and write about religion and politics that neither prescribes nor proscribes? Is it possible to work toward understanding lived political-religious realities while resisting the urge to normative closure? Can we remain open to epistemologies and ontologies that may cast doubt on modern certainties such as the supremacy of secular law, the indispensability of international human rights and freedoms, and the primacy of the so-called free market? I’m drawn to new work that embodies this sensibility and hope in my future work to convey its significance for global politics and public life.

One of the main points of the book, starting with the prologue, is that narratives of Christian persecution need to be reconsidered. What about Christians in the Middle East today who are suffering as a result of their religious identity? Don’t you leave them in the lurch?

EH: Religious freedom and religious rights are often presented as the default solution to the challenges of living together in a diverse and globalizing world – as a device for stopping conflict and ending oppression. But the reality is far more complex.

In Birds Without Wings, a novel set in rural Anatolia during WWI, there is a dialogue between two childhood friends, Mehmetçik, who is Muslim, and Karatavuk, who is Christian. That distinction has only recently come to make a difference in their lives. On the eve of Mehmetçik’s departure to join Atatürk’s forces, the two boys discuss their predicament: “Ah, my friend, my friend,” [Karatavuk] said, drawing back and thumping his chest, “I have a heavy feeling in here. I feel as if I have a stone in my heart. I wonder what’ll become of us all.” “I think we’ll be divided,” said Mehmetçik sadly. “Suddenly it matters that I am a Christian, where it mattered only a little before.”

Beyond Religious Freedom is, among other things, an attempt to understand some of the modern legal and political processes that contribute to situations where it matters—often in a life and death sense—that one is a Christian, a Hindu, a Jew, or an atheist. These situations do not just fall out of the sky. They are created in history. They involve intertwined socio-legal, religious, and political processes in which particular identities, often construed by the state and others in positions of power, shape subjectivities and collectivities, forms of sociality, and public and political relations and institutions. It is important to study each of these varied histories in their own right.

The politics of religious freedom are often at play in such histories. Modes of governance that rely on stabilizing ‘religion’ as an object of law and governance draw and naturalize the boundaries between religions, and between religion and non-religion, exacerbating the very social tensions they are intended to mitigate. When governments take up religious freedom, it requires that they discriminate: which “religions” are protected and how, and which individuals and communities have which religious rights enshrined in law. This places states and the religious freedom advocates who seek to mobilize them in the position of determining what counts as a legitimate religious practice, right, or community, granting the latter special status above the others. It thus gives governments more tools for disempowering those whom it dislikes, disagrees with, or refuses to recognize, creating political and legal spaces and institutions in which state-sponsored religious distinctions are not only inevitable but also publicly and politically salient.

What are your thoughts on those who make legal claims relying on the language of international religious freedom?

EH: I don’t pass judgment. As I emphasize throughout the book, there are strong legal incentives today that make claims to religious freedom efficacious. Individuals and groups can and should use all means at their disposal to make the best of difficult circumstances. My point is different. It is that in the long run we need to think about the kind of world we create when we legalize religious difference—in part through the promotion and legalization of religious freedom—and naturalize those distinctions. I argue that these efforts generate social tensions by making religious difference a matter of law, enacting a divide between the religion of those in power and the religion of those without it. This leads to a politics defined by religious difference, favors forms of religion authorized by those in power, and excludes other ways of being and belonging.

Therefore, the issue is not of being pro- or anti-religious freedom. Instead, my book asks, what are the effects of constructing a legal regime around ‘religious freedom’ and a discursive world around that. Does this advance or impede efforts to live together across deep lines of difference? Advocates of religious freedom presume that the answer is self-evident and affirmative. Along with a number of others, I see it as much more complex, and the outcome as much less utopian.

What would you have been if not a political scientist?

EH: Definitely a caterer. When I was in college I worked for a caterer in Boston, and we had a booth at Chowderfest and catered several weddings. I loved it. I would specialize in pies, cakes, and tarts. The minute I finished this book and had a moment to catch my breath this summer, I started making tarts. I’ve thought about making an offer: if you buy both books that just came out, I’ll come over to your house and bake you a cake.

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is associate professor of political science at Northwestern University. She is the author of The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton) and the coeditor of Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age and Politics of Religious Freedom.

Why is it that some social movements, such as organized labor and the Christian Right, have forged powerful alliances with political parties, while others, such as the antiwar movement, have not? When Movements Anchor Parties answers this question by looking at five prominent movements and their relationships with political parties, offering a new interpretation of electoral history. Recently, Daniel Schlozman took the time to answer some questions about his new book:

Tell me a bit about the book.

DS: When Movements Anchor Parties is about five social movements across American history that confronted American political parties. Two movements forged long-running alliances with parties: organized labor with the Democrats starting in the New Deal years and the Christian Right with the Republicans starting in the late 1970s. Two movements couldn’t make alliance work, and basically collapsed: the Populists in the 1880s and 1890s and the antiwar movement in the 1960s. And finally the abolitionist movement got inside the Republican Party but, as Reconstruction fell apart, couldn’t stay inside the party.

What’s your argument?

DS: The book does three things at once. First, it narrates the stories of these alliances and would-be alliances. And those stories go a long way to getting us our polarized politics. So much of what we’re arguing about today, about race, about wealth, about work, about war, about values, and so much of what’s politically possible or not, goes back to these confrontations between parties and movements.

Second, and more analytically, the book offers a framework to make sense of why movements do – or do not – get inside parties. Basically parties accept movements inside their coalitions if they prefer them to other paths to majority. Movements need to convince pragmatists inside parties that they’ll be a good electoral bet, and that they won’t upset the apple cart and disrupt the rest of party coalition too much. So movements have got to offer resources to parties that they can’t get elsewhere – votes, and the money, time, and networks needed to get votes. In return, parties will deliver policy for their group allies. That’s the exchange that makes alliance work. But it’s a tall order.

And finally, it’s a new way to understand big moments in American political history – what a prior generation called realignments. At all these major turning points – 1860, 1896, 1936, 1968, 1980 – came a major social movement making once-radical demands. As the parties responded, coalitions shifted, and possibilities opened and closed.

Why did you decide to examine cases across time rather than place?

DS: Comparisons of parties and movements across countries – and I draw on a long, rich tradition of them – almost invariably end up in the same place: that the United States is more or less exceptional given our history and our unique political system. So I flipped the question around. The book deliberately compares across American history and all the way across the ideological spectrum. I wanted to show similarities in apparently dissimilar cases. In different guises and with different results depending on the circumstances, movements with radically divergent priorities have faced common challenges in the American political system. For activists, or scholars of a particular movement or period, who read the book, I hope that’s eye-opening – and maybe even a little uncomfortable.

What advice would you offer to movements as they think about how to win influence inside the party system?

DS: Let’s be clear: When Movements Anchor Parties is not a how-to, but I think there are lessons. Above all, build movement organization. Without a sustained movement that can register its supporters and bring them to the polls, and then do the same for their friends and neighbors and coworkers and fellow congregants, parties will ignore movements’ demands, and mobilize directly. And the key movement-building is face-to-face contact, stitched together with leaders who understand national politics. Now, there’s a question about new technology here. We know that social media can mobilize, but how can they help build organization to last? We’ll see, but I’m skeptical that the hashtag can replace the basement meeting hall with folding chairs.

Another lesson, one that movements won’t want to hear: the most radical activists are a double-edged sword. They’re the most dedicated, tireless organizers, the ones who really expand the boundaries of the possible, but they’re sometimes beyond the pale for parties that want to win national majorities. So the price of alliance, the price of shifting possibilities in the political system as a whole, is often jettisoning those radicals. That’s not a normative statement; it’s just a repeated historical fact that comes through, especially for movements on the left. If you want to read the book as an argument for moderation over maximalism, I certainly won’t stop you.

The movement that gets this best – it’s not in the book, but, again, the lessons are clear – is for immigrants’ rights. They’ve organized hard in communities across the country, using a variety of tactics, and they’ve coalesced behind a clear set of ideas that they’ve made politically palatable. The Democratic Party looks at this bloc of voters and future voters, and sees majorities long down the line, but gets that it won’t win them without appealing to immigrants on their issues. Look at what Obama finally did on DACA, and what Hillary Clinton, who was much quieter on the issue in 2008, has proposed to do beyond that.

You were a local party activist yourself in Massachusetts for awhile. How did that experience influence the book?

DS: American parties are coalitions of really disparate groups trying to win elections and wield power together, and I saw that up close. I’d go to the Mass. Democratic conventions in Lowell or Worcester, and watch all these different tribes. It was my lefty-wonky crowd from Cambridge; the Irish backslappers; unions – the building trades, the SEIU in purple t-shirts, the teachers; the earnest suburban liberals straight from Lily Geismer’s book, with their resolutions about recycling; business types, who’d sponsor receptions. And the book is all about how movements do or do not get, in a quite literal sense, to take their seats at party conventions.

Also, procedure is the lifeblood of party politics, and I got pretty good with Robert’s Rules. That was really helpful as I did my research.

Tell me about the cover.

DS: As something of a busman’s holiday, I collect political buttons. They’re wonderful ways to tell the story – the stories, really – of American political history, and I was delighted to take four of my buttons out of their Riker mounts and photograph them for the cover. Somebody wrote a novel recently entirely in emojis. Maybe someday I’ll write a long complicated book about American political development with no words – only buttons.

Is your closest contact with the farming community your latest Instagram of a picturesque barn, or an occasional haul from the local CSA? If so, you’re not alone. Our day to day existence relies heavily on farming, but from Americans’ increasingly urban vantage point, the lives of farmers themselves can seem remote. In his forthcoming book, In the Blood, Princeton University sociologist of culture Robert Wuthnow offers a moving portrait of the changing lives of farm families. Recently Robert took the time to talk with us about what prompted him to write the book, the misconceptions he discovered, and how his new research spoke to his extensive body of work in the sociology of religion.

Robert Wuthnow, Princeton sociologist and author of IN THE BLOOD

You teach at Princeton University and live in a largely urban state. What prompted you to write a book about farming?

RW: I grew up on a farm in Kansas, spent most of my spare time until I graduated from college farming, and figured I would follow in the footsteps of many generations in my family who farmed. Things didn’t turn out that way. But I still have friends and family who farm and I’m intrigued, shall we say, by the path I didn’t take. I wrote about the changing history of agriculture in the Midwest in Remaking the Heartland and about rural communities in Small-Town America. After working on those projects I began reading the literature on farming. I discovered that most of it is written by agricultural economists and historians. As I sociologist, I wanted to hear from farmers themselves. I wanted to know what farming day-to-day is like, what it means to them, how it influences their values, and why they stay with it from generation to generation.

Why do you think people who don’t know much about farming might find this book interesting?

RW: Everybody – whether we live in a city, suburb, or small town – depends on farms for the food we eat. We know about problems with fast food, slaughterhouses, pollution, and the like. We also hear discussions every few years about farm policies. But for the most part, farming is out of sight and out of mind. In part, I wanted to give farmers a voice. I wanted people who know very little about farming to at least have something to read if they did happen to be interested.

Apart from questions about food and farm policies, the reason to be interested in farmers is that our nation’s culture is still the product of our agrarian past. Correctly or incorrectly, we imagine that today’s farmers represent that heritage. In one view, they represent conservative family traditions, hard work, living simply, and preserving the land. In that view, it is easy to romanticize farming. A different view holds that farmers are country bumpkins who couldn’t do anything better than continue to farm. In both these views, farmers are actually serving as a mirror for us. I wanted to hold that mirror up to see what it showed – about the rest of us as much as about farmers.

You say farmers think the public doesn’t understand them. What misperceptions need to be corrected?

RW: One of the most serious misperceptions is that farmers are out there mindlessly ruining the land. That certainly was not how they saw it. Of the two hundred farmers that form the basis of the book, nearly all of them described the reasons why they do everything they can to preserve the land. I was especially impressed with the extent to which science is helping them do this. Farmers today have a much better understanding of soil chemistry, microbes, and ways to minimize water use and pollution than farmers did a generation ago.

Another misperception is that farmers are the problem when it comes to questions about tax dollars spent on farm subsidies. My research included farmers with large holdings as well as small farmers and it dealt with wheat belt, corn belt, and cotton belt farming as well as truck and dairy farming. Farmers spoke candidly and many of them were candidly critical of farm subsidies. They did benefit from crop insurance and appreciated the fact that it was subsidized. But they were doubtful that government bureaucrats understood farming and they were pretty sure farm policies were being driven by corporate agribusiness rather than farm families.

Much of your work has been about religion. What did you learn about religion from farmers?

RW: I wondered if farmers whose livelihoods are so dependent on forces of nature over which they have no control would somehow attribute those influences to God or be superstitious about them. Would they consider it helpful to pray for rain, for example? What I found is that hardly any of them thought that way. Some were devout; others were not religious at all. The most common understanding was that God somehow existed, was ultimately in control, but was also beyond human comprehension. Those who were the most devout prayed, figuring that whether it rained or not, God was real.

Churches are still the mainstay of farming communities, but vast changes are taking place in these churches, just as in cities and suburbs. Small churches in declining communities are dying. The ones that remain struggle to attract members and employ pastors. Increasingly, farm families drive twenty or thirty miles to attend churches in large towns and cities. That is also where they go to shop and where their children go to school.

You argue that farmers are deeply loyal to their families but are also ruggedly independent. How so?

RW: What I found about family loyalty and rugged independence is that both are changing. The basic values are unchanged but their meanings are being redefined. For instance, farmers say that farms are good places to raise children. But they rarely mean that children drive tractors and milk cows. They mean that children gain an appreciation of living in the country. Farm families continue to be examples of family-operated businesses. But gender roles are changing and informal relationships are being replaced by formal contracts. Being independent means making your own decisions, not having someone looking over your shoulder, and not having your daily schedule dictated to you. But all of that is constrained by government regulations and by having to depend on markets over which one has no control.

What did you identify as the main challenges facing farmers today?

RW: Farmers face a challenge that has always been part of their lives and is becoming less predictable. That challenge is the weather. Climate change is bringing extremes in temperature, storms, and rainfall unlike anything farmers have known. In addition, farmers with small to medium acreage are being forced to expand or quit. Whether large-scale farming adds efficiency is still debated, but farmers worry that if they do not expand they will be left behind. And competition to expand necessarily influences relations among farmers. As many of the farmers we spoke to explained, they enjoy seeing their neighbors but they also view their neighbors as sharks in the water.

Of all the topics you explored in your interviews with farmers, what surprised you the most?

RW: Technology. Spending my days, as I do, tethered to a computer and the Internet, I suppose I should not have been surprised to learn the extent to which farming has also changed as part of the digital revolution. But I was. My research assistants and I conducted interviews by cell phone with farmers on their tractors while a GPS guidance system drove the tractor through the field within a margin of three inches, an on-board computer monitored the soil and adjusted seed-to-fertilizer ratios accordingly, and the farmer in turn kept track of fluctuations in commodities markets. Technology of that sort is hugely expensive. Farmers acknowledge that it is not only labor saving but also enjoyable. But the digital revolution is influencing everything about farming – from who operates the machinery to how often farmers see their children and from what they depend on for information to what they have to do to qualify for financing.

The farmers we spoke to were deeply committed to family farming as a lifestyle. They hoped it would continue and that some of their children would be farmers. But many of them expressed doubts. They worried about the corporate takeover of farming. And they were preparing their children to pursue careers other than farming.

Robert Wuthnow is the Gerhard R. Andlinger ’52 Professor of Social Sciences and director of the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University. He is the author of many books, including Rough Country, Small-Town America, Red State Religion, and Remaking the Heartland (all Princeton).

Yellowstone, the world’s first national park and a spectacular geothermal hot spot, has long been a popular summer vacation destination, with its unparalleled scenery, hiking and wildlife. But it also sits at the center of endless political struggles and environmental conflicts. What can Yellowstone teach us about the worsening environmental conflicts worldwide? And what can the persistent clashes about Yellowstone itself teach us about cultural upheaval in the US? Justin Farrell recently sat down to answer these questions and give us some background on the writing of his new book, The Battle for Yellowstone, which was recently called “The most original political book of early 2015″ by The Economist.

Why Yellowstone?

JF: Yellowstone National Park is the first national park in the world, and is a natural and cultural treasure of the United States. The history about how this happened is somewhat complicated, difficult, and imperialistic (as I describe in Chapter 1), but it remains a modern treasure nonetheless.

In recent years it has become a site for some of the most intractable environmental struggles in the world. As a prototype for conservation, these struggles have great impact beyond the bounds of the United States. This is why the issues I write about in the book draw so much attention from U.S. Presidents, Congress, environmental groups, local ranchers and farmers, national media, and millions of members of the public from outside of the Yellowstone region. Each year more and more money is poured into finding solutions, yet the toxic polarization rolls on.

What does morality have to do with anything?

JF: In and around Yellowstone there is a massive amount of energy put into solving these conflicts, and just about all of this energy is put into ascertaining more facts and technical knowledge about biology, ecology, economics, or law. While this is good, and we always need more of this, it has clouded what the conflict is really about, and hindered progress in a number of ways. Underneath this sort of reasoning is the notion that once people “have the facts,” they will make rational decisions based on those facts. Of course, we know this is not true.

Through several years of research on Yellowstone conflict, I ask more fundamental questions that reveal the sources of pre-scientific cultural, moral, and spiritual commitments that in many ways drive Yellowstone conflict. In the book I unpack this argument in much more detail, and describe empirically how environmental conflict in this area has intense cultural and moral dimensions that are often ignored, muted, or misunderstood by the participants in the conflict.

You’ve blended computational social science with traditional qualitative fieldwork. Can you explain why this methodological approach is important?

JF: Mixed-methods can open windows of insight that are often missed by a single methodological approach. I really enjoy computational methods, such as machine learning, text analysis, and network science. I wanted to blend them with the qualitative fieldwork in a way that worked together in a complementary way, rather than side by side. So my interview guides and choices for participant observation were many times informed by the computational social science. And vice-versa, the difficult interpretive work required by qualitative data was informed by what I found in the computational analyses. On a much broader note, I really believe that there are so many benefits to blending these types of research, and that qualitative researchers in particular should try to make use of computational social science because—as I try to show in the book (and in a class I teach here at Yale)—that there are a lot of similarities, and a lot of tools at our disposal that can help us better understand human culture.

What are the main theoretical contributions of the book?

JF: While the main contribution concerns morality and environmental conflict, there are four general contributions that fit more neatly into subfield boxes. I won’t go into too much detail here, but they are (1) a contribution to the (re)emerging field of sociology of morality; (2) bringing questions central to sociology of culture into the field of environmental sociology; (3) examining religion and spirituality in ostensibly non-religious or “secular” settings; (4) a methodological model and call for scholars to blend computational social science with qualitative fieldwork.

Environmental issues have become especially important in the 21st century, and will continue to do so. How might this book help solve the growing number of environmental conflicts around the world?

JF: The model and argument I develop in the book has broad application to any environmental issue where cultural factors weigh strong. My bias is that there are cultural factors weighing strong in almost any environmental issue, and are driven by larger conceptions and cultural commitments about what the “good” life looks like, and how we should go about living it in relationship to each other and to the natural world.

Justin Farrell is assistant professor of sociology in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University.

What lead to the radical shift in public perception of Asians from dangerous “yellow peril” to celebrated model immigrants and overachievers? Madeline Hsu, author of The Good Immigrants argues that the short answer is the American government, and the CIA in particular. Recently she took the time to tell us a bit more about the book, its intended audience, and her reasons for writing this fascinating ethnic history. Check out chapter one here.

What inspired you to get into your field?

MH: As an undergraduate at Pomona College, I benefited from excellent teaching and mentorship. History seemed to come very naturally to me and the emphasis on explaining through telling stories is for me a very instinctive way to understand the world.

What are you reading right now?

MH: I have just finished reading Rise of a Japanese Chinatown: Yokohama, 1894-1972 by Eric Han (Harvard University Press, 2014) which provides an illuminating comparison of how Chinese fared in monoracial Japan as it was evolving into a world power as compared to racial dynamics in the United States. Han is particularly effective in linking the changing fortunes of Chinese Japanese to the relationship between Japan and China, particularly with the decline and rise of the latter’s international standing. I am also reading Please Look After Mom by Kyung-sook Shin and The Usagi Yojimbo Saga, Bk. 2, a long-running graphic novel series by Stan Sakai featuring a rabbit ronin protagonist.

Describe your writing process. How long did it take you to finish your book? Where do you write?

MH: I had been thinking about and researching this project for about 7 or 8 years. It had begun with my observation that at a time of highly restrictive immigration laws before 1965, international students from Taiwan and other Asian countries were nonetheless able to resettle permanently in the United States. From there, my research took me many places such as refugee programs, the establishing of international education programs in the United States, US missionary activities in China, and the earliest of Chinese students to come to the US. After about 6 or 7 years, I was able to gain a sabbatical that gave me time to decide the parameters of the book and divide it into chapters. After that, it took me about a couple of years of hard writing to adapt and expand my various conference papers into the current manuscript. The key was figuring out my main arguments and chronology. I usually write at my desk at home, which looks out a window with a view of my neighbor’s beautifully kept front yard with agave and pecan trees.

Do you have advice for other authors?

MH: Rather than starting out with a fixed idea of what the book would argue, I had a question to which I sought answers. The subsequent research and the journey it has taken me on has revealed stories that have been unknown to myself and most others, but also help to make sense of major shifts in the positioning of Asians in the United States.

What was the biggest challenge involved with bringing this book to life?

MH: I am a single parent and struggle constantly with juggling responsibilities to my household and maintaining a certain level of writing and research.

Who do you see as the audience for this book?

MH: At a basic level, I hope it is accessible to informed and interested general readers who want to learn more about immigration policy, U.S. multiculturalism, and 20th century Chinese society with particular regard for migrations overseas. My goal is to explain complicated intersections between laws, popular attitudes, and government projects and how they shape the behaviors and choices of migrants in ways that highlight their humanity and shared values.

How did you come up with the title or jacket?

MH: The main title was suggested by the editorial board. I came up with the subtitle, which addresses a key problem in Asian American/immigration/ethnic history which has been how quickly Asians have transformed from being such dangerous and racially different “yellow peril” threats that they justified the earliest immigration restrictions and within a generation became celebrated model immigrants and overachieving Americans. The short answer is that the U.S. government, and in my book the CIA in particular, were pulling strings in the background. There were many unintended consequences, nonetheless, but Asians selected for their employment traits emerged as welcome immigrants.

Madeline Y. Hsu is associate professor of history and past director of the Center for Asian American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her books include Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home and the coedited anthology Chinese Americans and the Politics of Race and Culture.

Olivier Zunz is the Commonwealth Professor of History at the University of Virginia and the author of Philanthropy in America: A History, which was recently updated and re-released to include a new preface written by Zunz.

Recently, he answered some questions for HistPhil, a new philanthropy blog, on what philanthropy really means, what made him decide to write Philanthropy in America, and more.

One of the greatest challenges in writing an overview of the history of American philanthropy would seem to be defining the term itself. How did you think about what philanthropy means, and what you would include and exclude, in your survey? How do you think these decisions shaped your work? And how do you think they might shape the field of the history of philanthropy more generally?

OZ: I did not want to start with very strict definitions of what is philanthropy exactly because I was very aware that the word is used in many different contexts. I am a student of Tocqueville and having thought about the many different ways that he uses the word ‘equality’ and the many different ways he uses the word ‘liberty’ I felt that, very early on, what was most important for me was to capture a process of giving in American history rather than something we could clearly define as ‘philanthropy.’ I am in general agreement with the traditional distinction people have made between philanthropy and charity, with charity being more often used for various forms of almsgiving and temporary help and philanthropy more often used, at least in American history, for long-term goals, searching for root causes. This definition makes sense and to the extent that I respected one [definition], I respected that one. But I was more conscious of the magnitude of giving in the American economy and then of the need to think of philanthropy as a part of the capitalist economy, of giving as being a major component of what we call the nonprofit sector—of giving in a particular economic context. And I also wanted to think of giving as a politically involved proposition, if not explicitly at least implicitly. It was important to me to try to describe an ongoing process of giving that had political and economic consequences rather than to start with a narrow definition and say this is what we’re studying. I took the less obvious path to clarity, but eventually I thought that it would yield a greater understanding of the process.

Scott L. Montgomery and Daniel Chirot, both of the University of Washington, recently sat down for a Q&A on their new book, The Shape of the New: Four Big Ideas and How They Made the Modern World. Read on to learn what these four Enlightenment ideas are, and why they remain so important to the understanding of the ideological and political conflicts of our own time.

Why are ideas so important to the history of the modern world and also to understanding so much of the contemporary world?

Many of our social, cultural, and political perceptions have been shaped by big ideas first argued by long dead intellectuals. For example, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton’s argument on the shape of democracy more than 200 years ago continues to play out today in American debates over the size and scope and purpose of government.

Why use the term ‘ideas’ rather than ideology?

Ideology refers largely to already fixed, hardened positions about certain policy choices. The ideas we cover were much broader. The leading intellectuals who developed them understood many of the conflicting arguments and knew they had to argue their positions in order to have any lasting influence.

What are the “Four Big Ideas” of the title, and why do you focus on them?

Our focus is not on single concepts but entire systems of thought that have affected every level of social experience. Adam Smith wrote about the freedom that individuals must have to decide their material and moral lives and that, if attained, would create the most efficient, prosperous, and free society. Marx spoke of universal equality for humanity, a just and egalitarian world that would arrive due to scientific laws governing history. Darwin took evolution and turned it into a scientific theory of enormous force: with natural selection as its main mechanism, it gave all life a secular history and human beings a new context liberated from ancient traditions of religious purpose and final principles. Finally, modern democracy gained its first major success through the founders of the United States, most notably Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, two brilliant but flawed men whose fierce debates set down essential patterns for how to imagine and institutionalize this new political system that has spread throughout large portions of the world.

You seem to suggest that the most powerful ideas have come from the Enlightenment and mainly from areas like political philosophy, economics, and theories of society or history? Is this correct?

Yes, partly but not political, economic, and social thought alone. Ideas of vital, even extraordinary influence also emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries from the sciences and from religious thought, as shown in our discussion of Darwin and religious fundamentalism in Christianity and Islam. Other domains of thought, such as art and literature, played major roles in the shaping and movement of key ideas.

What are some examples of what you call the “Counter Enlightenment”?

Some hostility came from organized religions that resisted the Enlightenment’s defense of freedom of thought and skepticism about fixed dogma. Much also came from elites opposed to democratization and increased freedom for everyone. This Counter-Enlightenment has never gone away. Fascism and communism were based on powerful ideas that rejected much of the Enlightenment. Religious opposition remains in some fervent Christian denominations and in radical Islam there remains bitter hostility to much of modern science and to any questioning of holy texts and authority. Rather than witnessing the continuing expansion of democracy and greater individual freedom that seemed to characterize the late 20th century, some governments, not least China and Russia, reject that side of the Enlightenment and propose instead illiberal forms of autocracy as better alternatives.

What does this have to do with the humanities and social sciences?

We strongly feel that college and university education no longer insists enough on the importance of teaching the ideas on which free, dynamic societies are based. To resist the paranoia about threats coming from all sorts of poorly understood sources we have to reaffirm the importance of the great ideas that shaped so much that we value, and make it known how those ideas were used to combat ignorance and opposition to freedom. Ultimately it is imperative that we understand the ideas that oppose what we value so that we are better equipped to fight against them.

Scott L. Montgomery is an affiliate faculty member in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. His books include Does Science Need a Global Language?: English and the Future of Research. Daniel Chirot is the Herbert J. Ellison Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the University of Washington. His books include Why Not Kill Them All?: The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder (Princeton). They both live in Seattle.

With immigration at a record high, migrants and their children are a rapidly growing population whose integration needs have never been more pressing. Shedding new light on questions and concerns, Strangers No More is the first look at immigrant assimilation across six Western countries: Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States and Canada. Recently the authors, Richard Alba and Nancy Foner, provided context for their book and answered some questions on immigration, including how individual nations are being transformed, why Islam proves a barrier for inclusion in Western Europe in particular, and what future trends to expect.

Why does understanding immigrant integration in Western Europe and America matter?

Put simply, it’s one of the key issues of the twenty-first century on both sides of the Atlantic.

What makes it so urgent? The numbers: Western European countries as well as the US and Canada have been faced with incorporating millions of immigrants whose cultures, languages, religions, and racial backgrounds differ from those of most long-established residents.

Future trends: The challenges of integrating immigrants and their children—so they can become full members of the societies where they live—are likely to become even more important in the coming decades in the face of (1) continued demand for new immigrant inflows and (2) demographic shifts in which the huge number of people of immigrant origin—immigrants as well as their children—will constitute a much larger share of the adult population. Large portions of the immigrant-origin populations of these countries are going to come from the “low-status” groups—such as Turks in Germany, Pakistanis in Britain, and Mexicans in the U.S.—that are the focus of the book. There is no question that their opportunities are critical for the future.

Does any one country come out clearly ahead?

Basically, the answer is no. The book’s comparison of four European countries, Britain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, and two in North America, the United States and Canada, shows that when it comes to the integration of low-status immigrants—in terms of jobs, income and poverty, residential segregation, electoral success, children’s education, intermarriage, and race and religion—there are no clear-cut winners and losers. Each society fails and succeeds in different ways. Nor is there a consistent North America- Europe divide: Canada and the United States as well as countries within Europe differ in ways they’ve provided opportunities, and erected barriers, for immigrants.

So how is the United States doing?

In some ways the U.S. looks good compared to the continental European countries in the book. The U.S. has been quick (like Canada) to extend a national identity to immigrants and their children. Rates of intermarriage between those of immigrant origin and whites are relatively high. The U.S. has a pretty good record of electing immigrant-origin politicians, and is the only country to vote in the child of a non-Western immigrant to the highest national office.

In other ways, the U.S. has the highest bars to integration of all the six countries. The rate of residential segregation experienced by many immigrant families stands out as extreme. The disadvantages immigrants and their children confront in terms of their economic status is greatest in the U.S., which has the most severe economic inequality. The US also has the largest number—and proportion—of undocumented immigrants, who are denied basic rights and opportunities.

Aren’t all these countries being transformed by immigration?

Yes, they are. One could say that the face of the West is inevitably changing. During the next quarter century, a momentous transition to much greater diversity will take place everywhere. As the post-World War II baby booms—and such groups, made up largely of the native majority group, are found throughout North America and Western Europe– retire from work and become less socially active in other ways, they are going to be replaced by groups of young adults who in some countries will be relatively few in number, and everywhere will be more diverse, more likely to have grown up in immigrant homes.

The “mainstream” of these countries will change, too, in that the people who will occupy positions of authority and visibility will be much more diverse than in the past. We already see this occurring in the U.S., where younger workers in well-paid jobs are less likely to come from the non-Hispanic white group than their predecessors did. But there is a paradox. At the same time – and a cause for real concern—many young people of immigrant background are being left behind because of grossly unequal opportunities.

But why is Islam a much greater barrier to inclusion for immigrants and their children in Western Europe than it is in the United States?

One reason is basic demographics: a much larger proportion of immigrants in Western Europe are Muslim than in the U.S., where the great majority are Christian. Also, Muslim immigrants in the U.S. have a lower socioeconomic profile than those in Europe. Second: the way Christian religions in Europe have been institutionalized, and historically entangled with the state, has made it difficult for Islam to achieve equal treatment. In the U.S., the constitutional principles of religious freedom and separation of church and state have allowed Muslims more space to develop their own religious communities. Third: a secular mindset dominates in most Western European countries as compared to the high level of religiosity in the United States so that claims based on religion, and Islam in particular, have much less acceptance and legitimacy in Europe.

What is the good news—and the more positive side of the story?

One positive is the growing success of immigrant minorities in winning local and national political office in all six countries. Children of immigrants are mixing and mingling with people in other groups, including long-established natives, in schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces. The emergence of super-diverse neighborhoods contributes to the sense that ethnic and racial diversity is a normal order of things.

Intermarriage rates are rising among some immigrant groups in all the countries, so that more family circles bring together people of immigrant origin and longer-established natives—and children of mixed backgrounds are increasingly common. In the U.S., one out of seven marriages now crosses the major lines of race or Hispanic ancestry; and most of these intermarriages involve individuals from immigrant backgrounds and whites. Everywhere at least some children of low-status immigrants are getting advanced academic credentials and good jobs. And while racial and religious divisions seem like intractable obstacles, over time the barriers may loosen and blur.

Richard Alba is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include Blurring the Color Line and Remaking the American Mainstream. Nancy Foner is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her books include From Ellis Island to JFK and In a New Land.

The period considered classical Greece (roughly the 4th through 5th century BC) had a profound effect on Western civilization, forming the foundations of politics and philosophy, as well as artistic and scientific thought. Why did Greece experience such economic and cultural growth—and why was it limited to this 200-year period? Josiah Ober, Professor of Political Science and Classics at Stanford University and author of The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, took the time to explain the reasons behind Greece’s flourishing, and what its economic rise and political fall can tell us about our own world.

What was the rise of classical Greece and when and why did it happen?

JO: Basically, sustained economic growth lead to the rise of Ancient Greek civilization.

At the Early Iron Age nadir, in ca. 1000 BCE, the Greek world was sparsely populated and consumption rates hovered near subsistence. Some 650 years later, in the age of Aristotle, the population of the Greek world had increased at least twenty-fold. During that same period, per capita consumption probably doubled.

That rate of growth is far short of modern rates, but it equals the growth rate of the two standout societies of early modern Europe: Holland and England in the 16th to 18th centuries. Historians had long thought that the Greek world was impoverished and its economy overall static – which of course made Greek culture (art, philosophy, drama, and so on) seem that much more “miraculous.” But, thanks to the recent availability and quantification of a huge mass of data, drawn from both documentary and archaeological sources, we can now trace the amazing growth of the Greek economy, both in its extent (how many people, how much urbanization, and so on), and in terms of per capita consumption (how well people lived).

So the rise of the Greek world was predicated on sustained economic growth, but why did the Greek economy grow so robustly for so long?

JO: In the 12th century BCE, the palace-centered civilization of Bronze Age Greece collapsed, utterly destroying political and social hierarchies. Surviving Greeks lived in tiny communities, where no one was rich or very powerful. As Greece slowly recovered, some communities rejected attempts by local elites to install themselves as rulers. Instead, ordinary men established fair rules (fair, that is, for themselves) and governed themselves collectively, as political equals. Women and slaves were, of course, a very different story. But because these emerging citizen-centered states often out-competed elite-dominated rivals, militarily and economically, citizenship proved to be adaptive. Because participatory citizenship was not scalable, Greek states stayed small as they became increasingly democratic. Under conditions of increasingly fair rules, individuals and states rationally invested in human capital, leading to increased specialization and exchange. The spread of fair rules and a shared culture across an expanding Greek world of independent city-states drove down transaction costs. Meanwhile competition encouraged continuous institutional and technological innovation. The result was 700+ years of of world-class efflorescence, marked by exceptional demographic and per capita growth, and by immensely influential ideas, literature, art, and science. But, unlike the more familiar story of ancient empires, no one was in running the show: Greece remained a decentralized ecology of small states.

So what about the fall?

JO: There are two “falls” – one political and one economic. The economic fall is the decline of the Greek economy from its very high level in the age of Aristotle to a “premodern Greek normal” of low population and near-subsistence consumption levels with the disintegration of the Roman empire. That low normal had pertained before the rise of the city-state ecology. After the fall, it persisted until the 20th century. But we also need to explain an earlier political fall. Why, just when the ancient Greek economy was nearing its peak, were Philip II and Alexander (“the Great”) of Macedon able to conquer the Greek world? And then there is another puzzle: Why were so many Greek city-states able to maintain independence and flourishing economies in the face of Macedonian hegemony? The city-states were overtaken by the Macedonians in part because human-capital investments created a class of skilled and mobile experts in state finance and military organization. Hired Greek experts provided Philip and Alexander with the technical skills they needed to build a world-class army. But meanwhile, deep investments by city-states in infrastructure and training made fortified cities expensive to besiege. As a result, after the Macedonian conquest, royal taxes on Greek cities were negotiated rather than simply imposed. That ensured enough independence for the Greek cities to sustain economic growth until the Roman conquest.

What does the economic rise and political fall of classical Greece have to tell us about our own world?

JO: The new data allows us to test the robustness of contemporary theories of political and economic development. In the classical Greek world, political development was a primary driver of economic growth; democracy appears to be a cause rather than simply an effect of prosperity. The steep rise and long duration of the city-state ecology offers a challenge to neo-Hobbesian centralization theories of state formation, which hold that advanced economic and political development requires the consolidation of centralized state power. The comparatively low rate of ancient Greek income inequality, along with the high rate of economic growth, suggests that the negative correlation of sustained growth with extreme inequality, observed in some recent societies, is not a unique product of modernity. Finally, the history of the ancient Greek world can be read as a cautionary tale about the unanticipated consequences of growth and human capital investment: It reveals how innovative institutions and technologies, originally developed in the open-access, fair-rules context of democratic states, can be borrowed by ambitious autocrats and redeployed to further their own, non-democratic purposes.

How did you get interested in the topic of rise and fall – was it just a matter of “Edward Gibbon envy”?

JO: Gibbon is amazing, as a prose stylist and historian. But the origin of my project actually goes back to a quip by a senior colleague at the very beginning of my career: “The puzzle is not why the Greek world fell, it is why it lasted more than 20 minutes.” Twenty-five years ago (and fifteen years after my colleague’s quip), the historical sociologist W.G. Runciman claimed that classical Greece was “doomed to extinction” because the Greek city-states were, “without exception, far too democratic.” True enough: the classical Greek world eventually went extinct. But then, so did all other ancient societies, democratic or otherwise. The Greek city-state culture lasted for the better part of a millennium; much longer than most ancient empires. I’ve long felt that I owed my colleague a solution to his puzzle. This book is an attempt to pay that debt.

Josiah Ober is theMitsotakis Professor of Political Science and Classics at Stanford University. His books include Democracy and Knowledge, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens, The Athenian Revolution, and Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (all Princeton). He lives in Palo Alto, California.

Cormac Ó Gráda’s new collection of essays on famine—which range in focus from from the economic history to the psychological toll—begins with a taboo topic. Ó Gráda argues that cannibalism, while by no means a universal feature of these calamities, has probably occurred more frequently than previously recognized. Recently he answered some questions on his book, Eating People is Wrong, and Other Essays on Famine, Its Past, and Its Future, its somber title, and his early interest in The Great Irish Famine.

Why did you write this book?

CÓG: When Famine: A Short History (Princeton, 2009) came out, I wanted it to be my last book on the subject. So Eating People is Wrong was not a question of ‘what will I do next?’ I just realized a few years later that I had still had ideas to contribute on topics that would make for a new, different kind of book on famine. These topics ranged from famine cannibalism to the Great Leap Forward, and from market failure to famine in the 21st century; the challenge was to merge the different perspectives that they offered into what would become this new book. The idyllic résidence I spent in the south of France courtesy of the Fondation des Treilles in the autumn of 2013 was when the different parts came together. By the end of that stay, I had a book draft ready.

What inspired you to get into your field?

CÓG: It is so long ago that I am bound to invent the answer… But I have always had an amateur interest in history—as lots of Irish people tend to have—whereas my academic training was in economics. Economic history seemed a good way of marrying the two, and that has been my chosen field since my time as a graduate student in the 1970s. I began as a kind of jack-of-all-trades economic historian of Ireland, focusing on topics as different as inheritance patterns and famine, or migration and banking. This work culminated in a big economic history of Ireland in 1994. My interest in the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s goes back to my teens, but that interest was sharpened after getting to know Joel Mokyr (also a PUP author) in the late 1970s. Economics taught me to think of the Irish in comparative terms, and that led eventually to the study of famines elsewhere. My books have all been solo efforts, but I have very lucky and privileged to write papers with some great co-authors, and some of these papers influenced the books.

How did you come up with the title or jacket?

CÓG: The title is an ironic nod to Malcolm Bradbury’s eponymous novel (which most people seem ignorant of). A friend suggested it to me over a pint in a Dublin bar. One of the themes of the chapter on famine cannibalism, to which the title refers, is the need to realize that famines not only do terrible things to people, but that people do terrible things to one other in times of famine. Peter Dougherty and his team at PUP came up with jacket. The image is graphic and somber without being sensationalist, which is what I had hoped for.

What is your next project?

CÓG: There is no single all-consuming project. A lot of my research in recent years has been collaborative work on British economic history with UCD colleague Morgan Kelly. So far the results of that work have appeared—when we are lucky—in academic journals rather than in books. We have plans to continue on this basis, but we are also involved in an interesting piece of research with Joel Mokyr on the origins of the Industrial Revolution, and that may eventually yield a monograph by the three of us. I also want to revise several unpublished papers in Irish economic history and to get them published singly or, perhaps, as a monograph. Finally, Guido Alfani of Bocconi University in Milan and I are editing a book on the history of famine in Europe. This is coming along well. The end product will consist of nine specialist country chapters, a cross-country analysis of the famines of World War II, and an overview by Alfani and me.

What are you currently reading?

CÓG: I am at page 630 (so another hundred or so pages to go) of Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin, vol. 1 (Penguin, 2014), which brings the story of Iosif Vissarionovich only as far as 1928. I have been interested in Soviet economic history since the late Alexander Erlich introduced me to the topic in Columbia in the 1970s, and this is what attracted me to Kotkin’s riveting tome—which, however, turns out to rather uninterested in the economic issues! I am also reading Maureen Murphy’s Compassionate Stranger: Asenath Nicholson and the Great Irish Famine (Syracuse, 2015), an account of an eccentric but appealing American evangelist who toured Ireland, mostly on foot, in the years leading up to and during the Great Hunger. I was familiar with Nicholson’s own published accounts of her travels, but knew very little about her otherwise, so Murphy’s book is a revelation. My current bedtime reading is Henning Mankell’s The Man from Beijing (2010).

Cormac Ó Gráda is professor emeritus of economics at University College Dublin. His books include Famine: A Short History and Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory (both Princeton).

Nancy Woloch’s new book, A Class by Herself: Protective Laws for Women Workers 1890s-1990s, looks at the historical influence of protective legislation for American women workers, which served as both a step toward modern labor standards and as a barrier to equal rights. Recently, Nancy took the time to answer some questions about the book, her reasons for writing it, and the modern day legacies of this legislation, from pregnancy law, to the grassroots movement to raise the minimum wage.

Why did you write this book?

NW: Conflict over protective laws for women workers pervades twentieth-century US women’s history. These laws were everywhere. Since the early 1900s, almost every state enacted some sort of women-only protective laws—maximum-hour laws, minimum wage laws, night work laws, factory safety laws. Wherever one turns, the laws spurred debate, in the courts and in the women’s movement. Long drawn to the history of these laws and to the arguments that they generated, I saw the opportunity to carve out a new narrative: to track the rise and fall of protective laws from their roots in progressive reform to their collapse in the wake of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and beyond. Here was a chance to fuse women’s history and legal history, to explore social feminism, to reconstruct a “constitutional conversation,” and to ferret around all the topics that protective laws touch — from transatlantic connection to social science surveys to the rise of equal rights. Above all, the subject is contentious. Essentially, activist women disrupted legal history twice, first to establish single-sex protective laws and then to overturn them. This was irresistible.

What is your book’s most important contribution?

NW: My book shows the double imprint that protective laws for women workers left on US history. The laws set precedents that led to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and to modern labor law, a momentous achievement; they also sustained a tradition of gendered law that abridged citizenship and impeded equality until late in the century.

Which groups of women activists first supported women-only protective laws?

NW: I focus on members of the National Consumers’ League, a pressure group formed in 1898 and led as of 1899 by reformer Florence Kelley. One of the most vibrant and successful reform organizations of the Progressive Era, the NCL enabled the campaign for protective laws to move forward. I also focus on the federal Women’s Bureau, started in 1920, which inherited the mission of the NCL: to preserve and promote protective laws. Other women’s associations, too, were involved; so were women labor leaders. But the NCL and the Women’s Bureau were most crucial. Women who promoted women-only protective laws endorsed a dual rationale: the laws would redress disadvantages that women faced in the labor force and provide “industrial equality”; they would also serve as an “entering wedge” to labor standard for all workers. The dual rationale persisted, with variations, for decades.

How did you come up with the title?

NW: “A Class by Herself” is a phrase used by Justice David J. Brewer in Muller v. Oregon, the landmark Supreme Court decision of 1908 that upheld a state ten-hour law for women workers in factories and laundries. Woman, Justice Brewer stated, “is properly placed in a class by herself, and legislation designed for her protection may be sustained, even when like legislation is not necessary for men and could not be sustained.” Two issues intersect in the Muller case: Can the state impose labor standards? Is classification by sex constitutional? The fusion of issues shapes my narrative.

The Muller case remains fascinating. I am stunned with the exceptional leverage that Florence Kelley grasped when she intervened in the final appeal of the case. I am struck with the link that Muller’s lawyers posited between employers’ interests and equal rights; with the fragile relationship between the famous Brandeis brief and the Brewer opinion; and with the way that Justice Brewer challenged Brandeis for dominance. I still ask myself: Who took advantage of whom? Looking back on Muller, I find an intriguing contrast between that case and the Supreme Court case that terminally rejected the Muller principle, UAW v. Johnson Controls (1991). This is when single-sex protective laws definitively expired. Johnson Controls also offers a counter-image of the 1908 case.

Did classification by sex ever help women workers?

NW: Yes, of course. Women-only state protective laws might provide benefits to women workers. In many instances, they provided shorter hours, higher wages, or better working conditions, just as reformers envisioned. But women-only laws always had built-in liabilities. Laws based on “difference” perpetuate difference. They entail hierarchy, stratification, and unequal power. They can quash opportunity, advancement, and aspiration. Once embedded in law, classification in sex might be adapted to any goal conjured up by lawmakers, or, as a critic in the 1920s pointed out, used to impose whatever restrictions “appeal to the caprice or prejudice of our legislators.”

What sort of challenges did you face as an author?

NW: Protective laws were tough customers. They fought back; they resisted generalization; they defied narrative. Part of the challenge was that I deal with a great mass of legislation –several hundred state laws — and each type of law followed its own trajectory. I also cover the laws and their ramifications over many decades. To estimate the impact of protective laws on women workers at any given time was a hazardous undertaking; one could not easily measure the negative effects, or what one critic called the “debit side.” Changing circumstances compound the problem; the effects of the laws were always in flux. Not least, protective laws generate controversy among historians; to tackle this subject is to stroll through a minefield. A special challenge: to cope with the end of protective laws in the 1960s and 1970s.

What was the biggest surprise you encountered in writing this book?

NW: The role of “surprise” itself was a surprise. Progressive reformers who promoted women-only labor laws in the early 1900s could not see around corners, anticipate shifts in the economy, or envision changes in the female work force. Nor could their successors or their opponents. Much of my narrative is a story of close calls and near misses, of false hopes and unexpected consequences, of accident and unpredictability. The theme of the unforeseen peaks with the addition of “sex” to Title VII of the Civil Rights bill of 1964; the impact of the amended Title VII on women-only protective laws was yet more of a surprise. I was surprised myself, as narrator, by the complexity of the downfall of protective laws. I was also surprised to discover the key role that “overtime” played in my story and the gradual mutation in its meaning over the decades.

Does your subject have present-day legacies?

NW: Definitely. In a sense, single-sex protective laws sank totally out of sight when they capsized in the 1970s. But in another sense, many facets of the history of protective laws reverberate; the echoes pervade current events. Labor standards are now a global issue, as illustrated in Bangladesh in 2012 and 2013. The fire in a garment factory on the outskirts of Dhaka that killed 117 workers, so reminiscent of the 1911 Triangle fire, and the yet more lethal collapse of an 8-story building, with garment production on its upper floors, underline the need for safety regulation everywhere. Closer to home, the drive to improve labor standards continues. Most recently, we have seen a grassroots movement to raise the minimum wage and efforts to revise federal law on the threshold for overtime. Reconciling work and parenthood impels discussion. Pregnancy law remains a challenge; enforcement of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 has spurred more litigation than anyone expected. A recent case is Young v. United Parcel Service (2015). Beyond that, demands for compensated parental leave proliferate. President Obama’s proposal to fund parental leave, though unlikely to move forward right now, at least keeps the issue on the table. Finally, equal employment opportunity cases remain a challenge, from the Lily Ledbetter case of 2007 to the dismissed Wal-Mart case of 2011. Title VII, which catalyzed the end of single-sex protective law, turns out to be a work in progress.

This week we had the opportunity to ask Frank Cioffi questions about his new book, One Day in the Life of the English Language,which was recently featured in Inside Higher Ed. Cioffi offers insights on the “ethics” of usage, why grammar is “not just a set of rules”, and why students often readily grasp proper usage in exercises, but struggle with their own prose.

What was the inspiration for this book?

FC: Here is what I wrote in my five-year diary on 12/28/08: “millions of sentences are uttered and written. . . Most float off into a void, never to be heard of or recalled again. Most are ‘ungrammatical,’ no doubt unable to pass the scrutiny of a gimlet-eyed grammarian. But these sentences, and those of the previous days, and those of the next ones, make up our lives. They help to form the dense linguistic net of which we are all a part. And this book seeks to both represent that net and to show how you as a writer might well make a small, a human scale, a molecule-level, improvement of it.”

In what way or ways does your handbook differentiate itself from the thousand or so English handbooks already out on the market?

FC: I guess I am trying to persuade readers that Standard Written English (SWE) matters; it’s not just something to be memorized, like how to factor polynomials or the quadratic equation, but has a real impact on how we live and function as human beings. For example, using SWE usually improves one’s capacity for communicating to a wide and varied audience. More people will understand you if you use SWE than if you use, say, a dialect or an argot.

In addition, when you don’t use SWE you run the risk of stigmatizing yourself, of giving your audience the excuse to ignore what you say (“He can’t be saying anything of any importance—he’s clearly uneducated and dumb”). Now that’s not the right response, I know, and I emphasize in my book that we should not stigmatize people because their English is unpolished or somewhat far from the “standard,” but it still happens, so people need to learn SWE in order not to be stigmatized.

For many decades now I’ve been teaching English at the college level, and I have seen a lot of handbooks. None of them, I felt, had a sufficiently human voice. Most books say, “Here it is: learn it.” I say, “Here it is, and here is why it’s important to learn it.” Fred Crews’s Random House Handbook was something of an exception, but it’s now out of print. It is also not a compact book, which mine attempts to be.

Tell us a bit more about the “voice” of a handbook.

FC: Grammar books have multiple voices: the author who is lecturing, the author who is commenting on samples of English, and the sample sentences, often also by the author. I thought there was something wrong with all of these as they exist in current texts. In particular, I wanted the sentences to come from a real world, not the one of “Dick and Jane” books.

Here is the paradox I saw: students could do worksheets or exercises very readily, but their own prose didn’t reflect the lessons of those exercises. For example, my students did a worksheet on comma splices, but comma splices still marred their writing. We did a worksheet on apostrophes, but apostrophes were still a major problem in the formal papers. Why is that?

It seemed to me that maybe in our handbooks, workbooks, and even lectures, we tended to simplify example sentences too much. We tended to make them spare and simple so as to illustrate a grammatical point. But that point is easy to understand with simple sentences. As complexity grows, the capacity for error enlarges.

At the same time, students might think, “Only a total dummy would make a mistake like this sample sentence!” or maybe “That’s not me!”Or they might think, “This book is totally condescending.”

So I wanted sample sentences that were complex.

But the problem here was that making up sentences in the sample sentence genre suddenly grew difficult, since their lack of content becomes much more apparent as they grow in elaborateness. This made me wonder about the “world” depicted in the example sentences. It’s a made-up world. a world of nonevents, a world where nothing scary or awful or threatening or sexy happens. It’s the same world that the Educational Testing Service depicts in the “fairness guidelines” that they give to test preparers, which in some ways makes sense. We don’t want to distract students from the grammatical issue at hand.

Yet the world of these sample sentences has the interesting effect of making grammar somehow disembodied, disconnected from a real world. Its sentences emerge from a world where nothing is really happening, and where nothing really matters. What message does that send to our students or to our readers?

That’s when I decided to go for real-world sentences.

These come from the “one day,” then, of your title?

FC: Yes. I didn’t want to make these the culled variety we see in Strunk and White, or Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s book The Reader over Your Shoulder. No. I just wanted them to be from a single day, since that would show how we all make mistakes, how language is really tricky even for professionals to get just right.

So I combed magazines and newspapers published on December 29, 2008, and I tried to find examples of good sentences, elegant sentences, let’s say, as well as of sentences whose grammar struck me as “dubious,” as one of my colleagues likes to say. I came up with almost 300 of these sentences, so the book is at once a grammar handbook and a curious snapshot of history, on a day that is not particularly historical. And oddly enough, even though it’s more than six years later now, a lot of the sentences still resonate with current events.

What about the “rules” of Standard Written English: don’t you feel these need to be hammered home?

FC: As far as “learning grammar” goes, I didn’t want to provide just a set of rules, though of course I do emphasize what’s SWE and what is not. I instead argue that students and readers need to internalize the pattern and form of English sentences, really need to get inside them in a profound way, need to become, in a way, linguists themselves, in order to express themselves more fully.

In addition, I wanted to be honest. The rules of English are not apodictic: they are constantly being debated by professors; they are under constant pressure. Think of the problems with pronoun reference. Think of the “acceptable” comma splice. There are borderlands of acceptability in English that are becoming increasingly large.

And too we need to recognize that not all English needs to be SWE. We need to allow our students their own language in many situations, just as editors allowed that in the papers and magazines I looked at. One of the things we want to keep in mind is that so much of the success of one’s English has to do with accurately gauging what’s appropriate to a given situation, with assessing the audience for one’s words.

Your book also emphasizes the “ethics” of usage. Can you elaborate on this?

FC: I also suggest that grammaticality or accuracy is something that has an ethical component, since lives, careers, futures—our future—can hinge on the accuracy of English. At the same time, SWE often allows people to better express their ideas to a wider audience—people can get heard “when it matters,” if they properly gauge their audience and if they are able to be agile enough with their language to move from one register to the next, and to assume SWE when it’s needed and abandon it when it might be counterproductive, when it might sound stilted or stuffy or supercilious to use it.

What surprised you about writing and publishing this book?

FC: I was surprised by how hard it was to get published. It came close to being accepted by a couple of textbook houses, but it didn’t make the grade. One time, after three very positive outside reviews, I thought the book was as good as accepted. I was to meet with the editor soon and we were to work out the details. But then at the last minute the editor canceled our meeting and said the book could not be published by her press.

“Why not?” I wondered. Then it occurred to me that if I am writing a book that challenges the value of standard handbooks, then a publisher that has 100 such handbooks on its list isn’t likely to publish mine! This also clued me in to why it is that all the handbooks out there are so similar.

It’s as if there is a weird monopoly of ideas—we can’t rock the boat too much with new ideas or approaches, since we’re making a ton of money off of the old ones!

When I was teaching in Poland a few years ago, it was communist days, and I was complaining about censorship. One of my colleagues, though, challenged me on this: “You have censorship in America, too, you know, and it’s as repressive of new ideas as ours is, maybe more: books that aren’t deemed salesworthy are simply not published. That silences all sorts of voices.” So a book might be itself salesworthy, but might drag down the sales of the other books published by a press, so that book won’t see print, at least not by them.

So do you think your book might change the way that college writing is taught?

FC: My book attempts to get writing instructors to grapple on an ongoing basis with the complexities of English usage and grammar, and to work with students as they try to plumb these issues together. It’s not a quick fix. It’s a course of instruction in what, for many students, is a new language altogether. If we really want to change the quality of the work our students produce, we need to reimagine how the college composition course is structured, staffed, and funded.

How did you come up with the title of the book, which is a play on Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich?

FC: I was going to call it “One Day’s Sentences in America,” but I wasn’t all that happy with that title. One day, though, my wife, Kathleen Cioffi, said, “Hey, why not call the book ‘One Day in the Life of the English Language’?” Bingo.

What are you reading right now?

FC: Right now I am reading a collection of short stories by Alberto Moravia. He is a marvelous and, I think, neglected Italian writer. His stories examine the minutiae of daily life; they explore the psychological menace and poignancy of the ordinary. In some ways they are stories about a lack of communication between people and the effects of that.

What are your next writing projects?

FC: I have several going on right now. Probably I have too many. I have three completed book manuscripts: one is about teaching entitled Beyond Zombie Pedagogy. I’ve also written a biography of my late uncle, the philosopher Frank Cioffi. And I kept a detailed diary of my life in communist Poland. The diary is maybe 700,000 words, though—I kept it for three years—so I need to cut it down and turn it into a narrative/analysis of life in Poland in the waning days of communism. Still waiting for publishers and contracts for these three books—!

I also have a volume of poetry that I’ve culled from the hundreds of poems I’ve written over the last three decades.

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